Saturday, December 03, 2005

The Pentagon has decided to brazen it out and defend the practice of secretly paying to place happy-news stories in the Iraqi press as a) perfectly legitimate “rebuttal information” to counter the “lies” of the insurgents and “get the truth out there”, b) a practice “customary in Iraq.”

Although it is widely reported that Condi Rice, who is visiting Europe next week, will answer the questions of European governments about secret prisons, Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern, who met her on a visit to the US this week, says (I can only found a paraphrase, not a direct quote) that she told him that “she expected allies to trust that America does not allow rights abuses.” Ah yes, the old “trust me” ploy.

The front-runner in Chile’s presidential elections is Michelle Bachelet, who was tortured as a dissident during the Pinochet years, and whose father was tortured to death.

On the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat, various bus systems kept a seat unoccupied in her honor and inevitably someone in New York – although a tourist, not a New Yorker – sat in it and wouldn’t get up. “I think I’ve got a right to sit here,” she said. Welcome to your place in history, Fiona Humphreys of Bristol.

The Chinese finally admit that they harvest organs from people they execute and sell them to rich foreigners, but promise to “tidy up the medical market.”

The annual Bad Sex in Fiction prize has been awarded, to Giles Coren’s novel Winkler. I didn’t think it was as funny as previous winners, so I was going to pass on posting it this time, but there’s something I rather like about the form in which the London Times (for which Coren is a restaurant reviewer) printed the award-winning passage:

And he **** **** in her ***** and his **** jumped around and ******* on her ***** and he blacked *** and she **** his **** out of her ***** and lifted ******* from his **** and ******* the pillow away and he ****** and ******* at the air, and he **** again so **** that his **** ******** out of her **** and a **** of it *** him straight in the *** and ***** like ******* he’d ever *** in *****, and he yelled with the pain, but the **** could have been ********, and as she ******* at his ****, which was ******* around like a ****** dropped in an ***** ****, she ********* his **** deeply with the ***** of both **** and he **** three **** times, in ***** ****** on *** chest. Like Zorro.